So, for instance, she knew that snakes could be camouflaged to look like
dried leaves. She knew the sounds of various bird calls. She knew which
signs to look for in order to find water and she ended up finding a creek.
Her dad had also once told her that if you followed the flow of running
water you would eventually find civilization.
As described in her book When I Fell from the Sky, she passed vultures
feeding on corpses. Snakes, mosquitoes, and deadly spiders were a
continual threat. One of her wounds became infested with maggots. She
suffered from the heat of the sun. But all the time she was aided by
knowledge.
She decided to walk as much as possible in the water of the stream, in
order to avoid snakes, spiders, and the poisonous plants of the jungle floor.
She stayed in the middle of the stream in order to avoid piranhas, which she
knew mainly swam in shallow water. She knew this would mean she would
probably encounter alligators, but she also knew that, unlike snakes,
alligators rarely attacked humans.
On and on she walked, as her infested wound grew ever more painful.
She had no food now. She felt weary and in a dream-like state. Yet she had
a determination she believed was passed down from her father: “ ‘When we
have really resolved to achieve something,’ my father once said, ‘we
succeed. We only have to want it, Juliane.’ ”
She stayed on the lookout for jungle paths, found one, and then followed
it. It led her to a deserted hut that had a liter of petrol outside. She had also
been taught that in an emergency petrol can be a (painful) remedy for
severely infected wounds, so she used it to dress her own injury.
Eventually, on the eleventh day, she heard human voices and the jungle-
dwelling men who found her took her on a long boat trip back to
civilization. The day after her rescue she was reunited with her father.
Koepcke’s story would eventually be the subject of the Werner Herzog–
directed documentary Wings of Hope, Herzog himself having originally
been an intended passenger on the ill-fated plane. Juliane graduated in
biology and kept the family tradition of zoology alive, as she is currently
the librarian at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich.